VoIP help

I have set up a simple VoIP phone solution for my business, and it’s worked ok for over a year, but I’m disappointed in the call quality. I know some VHSers are quite skilled in VoIP solutions. Do you have suggestions of different providers or solutions that would work better for me?

cc: @TyIsI @SteveRoy

Current setup

I have a phone number (778-516-8006) from TheSpout which was the only SIP provider I could find that had numbers local to Summerland, BC. I use SIP to forward these calls over the Internet to Twilio. In Twilio I use a series of Twimlets to 1) play a recording 2) allow the caller to choose what “department” they want; and 3) calling out to one of our cell phones over PSTN.

This year I would also like to get a physical SIP phone, and have one of the options ring that phone (anyone have a basic SIP phone I could buy/trade?)

Drawbacks

No caller id

Twilio doesn’t “trust” the caller id information that comes over SIP from TheSpout, so it won’t forward the caller id when it connects the call to our cellphones. This is kind of annoying but not a dealbreaker.

Call quality

There is occasionally too much delay, jitter, and audio artifacts. I suspect this is because of the SIP connection between the two providers.

Solutions?

I would try bringing it all into Twilio, but they don’t support local numbers in Summerland, BC. And they don’t seem to be able to port numbers outside of USA anyway.

I would try bringing it all into TheSpout, but they don’t have TwiML and twimlets and such. I’m not sure I can configure the same system myself, but maybe they can help me set it up.

What do you think?

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Luke, I use voip.ms but I’m not sure about Summerland - perhaps this is too restrictive and you’d be better with an 800 number?

Take a look a voip.ms it has a lot of features like IVR, recordings, calling groups etc. I send our home number to a call group that calls the ATA at home, a voip client on my cell and a voip client on my desk at work all at once. First to answer takes the call. I ported my number from Telus to them, perhaps you can port a Summerland number to them, not sure why they’d care where it came from.

BTW I would recommend an ATA over a SIP phone (I think I have a spare SIP phone from fishboy’s purge). An ATA lets you use a traditional handset using existing wiring - we use a basic DECT wireless base and phones. I’ve found most SIP phones clunky.

BTW I love the voip,ms website, it’s really clear they’re focused on back end features and haven’t spent lots of money making this unnecessarily pretty.

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Does TheSpout support routing calls to a SIP URI? It sounds like it. You could also sign up for voip.ms as Tom suggests, and set up a SIP URI for the incoming calls, then use their IVR etc. features to direct the call where you want it. I’m not sure it will let you forward the caller ID, but instead of using the PSTN, you could route the call to a SIP extension for a mobile phone or ATA etc. which should copy the CID. I believe you can even do this on a free account if you’re not making any PSTN calls. The vancouver voip.ms server and thespout Canada server both seem to be in the same facility in Vancouver, so you shouldn’t really lose any quality doing this.

Another option would be to operate a SIP server yourself; pretty easy these days to do this on a Raspberry PI or similar.

The only SIP phones worth anything are the business-class ones that are $100s; I like Polycom. Otherwise just get an ATA.

In Canada, numbers can be ported only within the LIR they were initially assigned. These more or less correspond to local calling areas. To receive ported numbers within an LIR, the receiving carrier needs to have a presence at the interconnect exchange for that LIR. It appears that at least voip.ms and probably most others aren’t present at the necessary location. I believe the LIR for Summerland is 808617 - OKANAGAN - SIMILKAMEEN. A provider that can accept numbers from Penticton can probably accept numbers from Summerland, even if they don’t list it.

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Yeah, I’d recommend voip.ms with a 800 number.

Or do you have another specific reason why you want a Summerland number?

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